Review by Frank Plowright
Dwellings is a series of horror stories carefully crafted to work on so many levels. The designs and art are contrived to resemble Harvey comics of the 1960s and 1970s, publishers of cheery adventures starring Casper the Friendly Ghost and Richie Rich, with a uniform eight panels per page. The homage is accurate down to the faked adverts, slightly discoloured pages and flat colour, sometimes slightly out of register, through which Jay Stephens mimics the friendly house style established by Harvey’s top artist Warren Kremer.
However, while there’s always been artistic skill and childlike innocence to Stephens’ stories, Dwellings subverts his usual cheeriness by placing friendly characters in nightmare scenarios. They emerge via indelibly corrupting themselves, although it’s noted that although residents of Eldwich may be drawn to look like children, they’re adults, and therefore own their dark deeds. Johnny is haunted by crows who know he’ll kill again; Dawn attends a psychiatric conference to discover a case of demonic possession; a woman’s grandmother goes missing from a sinister care home and she discovers her haunted hand puppet and so on.
A first thought might be that horror stories drawn in such a disarmingly friendly style might diminish the impact. After all, horror has become progressively more explicit, moving from suggestion to the brutality of hardcore impact, so surely cartoon horror will fall flat? It doesn’t, perhaps because we have become so desensitised, and Stephens taps into something profoundly disturbing with his friendly cartoon characters subjected to excess or committing it. It also may seem like a one-note joke not worth repeating, but that’s not the case either. Stephens has crafted his terrors well, and were each drawn with greater realism they’d maintain their power and capacity to frighten, not least because he explores different forms of horror starring different people from the aware to the innocent, with the insane always hovering on the periphery. Only a world weary police detective with problems of her own recurs in a minor role, although there’s a toying with readers by having a character who suffered a grisly fate seen briefly in later stories.
Yes, for all the horror, Dwellings is playful. Stephens is plainly enjoying his form of deconstruction and homage. Pastiche of old comics, especially horror comics, is hardly a new trick, yet Stephens pitches it perfectly, never gurning for the audience and with beautiful cartooning.
